The race to remove CO2 from our atmosphere is on. In an effort to draw down carbon at a meaningful scale, people are looking to the ground. The top meter of the world's soil holds over three times the amount of carbon currently in our atmosphere--and if we treat our land better, it could suck up even more. This is good news for farmers. Companies and individuals desperate to offset their emissions by purchasing carbon credits are willing to pay farmers to use sustainable agricultural practices and sequester carbon in their fields.

This farm in Arkansas may soon be the most scientifically advanced farm in the world. There's a farm in Arkansas growing soybeans, corn, and rice that is aiming to be the most scientifically advanced farm in the world. Soil samples are run through powerful machines to have their microbes genetically sequenced, drones are flying overhead taking hyperspectral images of the crops, and soon supercomputers will be crunching the massive volumes of data collected. Scientists at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), working with the University of Arkansas and Glennoe Farms, hope this project, which brings together molecular biology, biogeochemistry, environmental sensing technologies, and machine learning, will revolutionize agriculture and create sustainable farming practices that benefit both the environment and farms. If successful, they envision being able to reduce the need for chemical fertilizers and enhance soil carbon uptake, thus improving the long-term viability of the land, while at the same time increasing crop yields.

To produce high-quality food and feed a growing world population with the given amount of arable land in a sustainable manner, we must develop new methods of sustainable farming that increase yield while minimizing chemical inputs such as fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides. I and my colleagues are working on a robotics-centered approaches to address this grand challenge. My name is Andres Milioto, and I am a research assistant and Ph.D. student in robotics at the Photogrammetry and Robotics Lab (http://www.ipb.uni-bonn.de) Together with Philipp Lottes, Nived Chebrolu, and our supervisor Prof. Dr. Cyrill Stachniss we are developing an adaptable ground and aerial robots for smart farming in the context of the EC-funded project "Flourish" (http://flourish-project.eu/), where we collaborate with several other Universities and industry partners across Europe. The Flourish consortium is committed to develop new robotic methods for sustainable farming that aim at minimizing chemical inputs such as fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides in order to reduce the side-effects on our environment.